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Hopkins’s Poetry

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Analysis

“God’s Grandeur” (1877)

Themes

The Manifestation of God in Nature

Hopkins used poetry to express his religious devotion,
drawing his images from the natural world. He found nature inspiring
and developed his theories of inscape and instress to explore the
manifestation of God in every living thing. According to these theories,
the recognition of an object’s unique identity, which was bestowed
upon that object by God, brings us closer to Christ. Similarly,
the beauty of the natural world—and our appreciation of that beauty—helps
us worship God. Many poems, including “Hurrahing in Harvest” and “The
Windhover,” begin with the speaker praising an aspect of nature,
which then leads the speaker into a consideration of an aspect of
God or Christ. For instance, in “The Starlight Night,” the speaker
urges readers to notice the marvels of the night sky and compares
the sky to a structure, which houses Christ, his mother, and the
saints. The stars’ link to Christianity makes them more beautiful.

The Regenerative Power of Nature

Hopkins’s early poetry praises nature, particularly nature’s
unique ability to regenerate and rejuvenate. Throughout his travels
in England and Ireland, Hopkins witnessed the detrimental effects
of industrialization on the environment, including pollution, urbanization,
and diminished rural landscapes. While he lamented these effects,
he also believed in nature’s power of regeneration, which comes
from God. In “God’s Grandeur,” the speaker notes the wellspring
that runs through nature and through humans. While Hopkins never
doubted the presence of God in nature, he became increasingly depressed
by late nineteenth-century life and began to doubt nature’s ability
to withstand human destruction. His later poems, the so-called terrible sonnets,
focus on images of death, including the harvest and vultures picking
at prey. Rather than depict the glory of nature’s rebirth, these
poems depict the deaths that must occur in order for the cycle of
nature to continue. “Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord” (1889)
uses parched roots as a metaphor for despair: the speaker begs Christ
to help him because Christ’s love will rejuvenate him, just as water
helps rejuvenate dying foliage.

Motifs

Colors

According to Hopkins’s theory of inscape, all living things
have a constantly shifting design or pattern that gives each object
a unique identity. Hopkins frequently uses color to describe these
inscapes. “Pied Beauty” praises God for giving every object a distinct
visual pattern, from sunlight as multicolored as a cow to the beauty
of birds’ wings and freshly plowed fields. Indeed, the word pied means
“having splotches of two or more colors.” In “Hurrahing in Harvest,”
the speaker describes “azourous hung hills” (9)
that are “very-violet-sweet” (10). Elsewhere,
the use of color to describe nature becomes more complicated, as
in “Spring.” Rather than just call the birds’ eggs “blue,” the speaker
describes them as resembling pieces of the sky and thus demonstrates
the interlocking order of objects in the natural world. In “The
Windhover,” the speaker yokes adjectives to convey the peculiar,
precise beauty of the bird in flight—and to convey the idea that nature’s
colors are so magnificent that they require new combinations of
words in order to be imagined.

Ecstatic, Transcendent Moments

Many of Hopkins’s poems feature an ecstatic outcry, a
moment at which the speaker expresses his transcendence of the real
world into the spiritual world. The words ah, o,
and oh usually signal the point at which the poem
moves from a description of nature’s beauty to an overt expression
of religious sentiment. “Binsey Poplars” (1879),
a poem about the destruction of a forest, begins with a description
of the downed trees but switches dramatically to a lamentation about
the human role in the devastation; Hopkins signals the switch by
not only beginning a new stanza but also by beginning the line with
“O” (9). Hopkins also uses exclamation points
and appositives to articulate ecstasy: in “Carrion Comfort,” the
speaker concludes with two cries to Christ, one enclosed in parentheses
and punctuated with an exclamation point and the other punctuated
with a period. The words and the punctuation alert the reader to
the instant at which the poem shifts from secular concerns to religious
feeling.

Bold Musicality

To express inscape and instress, Hopkins experimented
with rhythm and sound to create sprung rhythm, a distinct musicality
that resembles the patterns of natural speech in English. The flexible
meter allowed Hopkins to convey the fast, swooping falcon in “The
Windhover” and the slow movement of heavy clouds in “Hurrahing in
Harvest.” To indicate how his lines should be read aloud, Hopkins
often marked words with acute accents, as in “As Kingfishers Catch
Fire” and “Spring and Fall.” Alliteration, or the juxtaposition
of similar sounds, links form with content, as in this line from
“God’s Grandeur”: “And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared
with toil” (6). In the act of repeating “red,”
our mouths make a long, low sound that resembles the languid movements
of humans made tired from factory labor. Elsewhere, the alliterative
lines become another way of worshiping the divine because the sounds
roll and bump together in pleasure. “Spring” begins, “Nothing is
so beautiful as Spring— / When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and
lovely and lush” (1–2).

Symbols

Birds

Birds appear throughout Hopkins’s poetry, frequently as
stand-ins for God and Christ. In “The Windhover,” a poem dedicated
to Christ, the speaker watches a falcon flying through the sky and
finds traces of Christ in its flight path. The beauty of the bird
causes the speaker to reflect on the beauty of Christ because the
speaker sees a divine imprint on all living things. Similarly, “As
Kingfishers Catch Fire” meditates on the innate behaviors and patterns
of beings in the universe: the inscape of birds manifests in their
flights, much as the inscape of stone manifests in the sound of
flowing water. Christ appears everywhere in these inscape manifestations.
In Christian iconography, birds serve as reminders that there is
life away from earth, in heaven—and the Holy Ghost is often represented
as a dove. “God’s Grandeur” portrays the Holy Ghost literally, as
a bird big enough to brood over the entire world, protecting all
its inhabitants.

Fire

Hopkins uses images of fire to symbolize the passion behind
religious feeling, as well as to symbolize God and Christ. In “God’s
Grandeur,” Hopkins compares the glory of God and the beautiful bounty
of his world to fire, a miraculous presence that warms and beguiles
those nearby. He links fire and Christ in “The Windhover,” as the
speaker sees a flame burst at the exact moment in which he realizes
that the falcon contains Christ. Likewise, “As Kingfishers Catch
Fire” uses the phrase “catch fire” as a metaphor for the birds’
manifestation of the divine imprint, or inscape, in their natural
behavior. In that poem too, the dragonflies “draw flame” (1),
or create light, to show their distinct identities as living things.
Nature’s fire—lightning—appears in other poems as a way of demonstrating
the innate signs of God and Christ in the natural world: God and Christ
appear throughout nature, regardless of whether humans are there
to witness their appearances.

Trees

Trees appear in Hopkins’s poems to dramatize the earthly
effects of time and to show the detrimental effects of humans on
nature. In “Spring and Fall,” the changing seasons become a metaphor
for maturation, aging, and the life cycle, as the speaker explains
death to a young girl: all mortal things die, just as all deciduous
trees lose their leaves. In “Binsey Poplars,” the speaker mourns
the loss of a forest from human destruction, then urges readers
to be mindful of damaging the natural world. Cutting down a tree
becomes a metaphor for the larger destruction being enacted by nineteenth-century
urbanization and industrialization. Trees help make an area more
beautiful, but they do not manifest God or Christ in the same way
as animate objects, such as animals or humans.